Next day, after having told daddy all about it, she wrote to the addresses that Santa Claus had given her. She wrote the letters in ink and used her very bestest best blue note-paper. All the letters were sealed with a Santa Claus sticker. It did take a great deal of time, I assure you.
The invitations were to Mamie and Johnnie and Toby Smith. They were to Tony Pettino and Lily Wicks and Benny Wicks who lived in a part of the city Mary Louise had never seen. Nurse said it was a very sad part of the city. When Mary Louise asked if she might go there and see it and see the children, nurse said she guessed Santa Claus didn’t know what he was talking about—she guessed not. Mary Louise insisted, but all in vain. Santa Claus had told her what the children’s ages were and left the gifts to Mary Louise’s selection.
When daddy had taken the letters to the poor children in his overcoat pocket to mail, Mary Louise fell to planning about the gifts. Only one little girl—all boys! How dreadful! But mother helped Mary Louise by suggesting things that little boys might like. From her own playthings Mary Louise selected her biggest doll for Lily and would have given her ever so many other dolls, had not mother thought that Mary Louise might add other little girls to her Christmas list of poor children and make the helping of Santa Claus more equally distributed among those who might otherwise be forgotten.
How fast the nineteen dollars and fifty-three cents did go—just buying the tree and the fixings, and the sled and the overcoat and mittens, and skates, and carts, and baseball bats! It was a tragic moment when Mary Louise suddenly discovered that Benny had been neglected and didn’t have as many gifts as the others. She consulted daddy, as there were no boys’ toys among her playthings and nothing seemed right. Daddy said—well, he said she might work and earn the money to buy Benny a present.
Never in her life had Mary Louise worked to earn money! “How can I earn money?” she asked.
Daddy thought. “If you will learn the seven times seven table, and the eight, and the nine and any of the others, I’ll give you a dollar for every one you can say perfectly. That’s very special, Mary Louise, because it’s Christmas, you know.”
Dear me! To think of having to sit down quietly in all the excitement of Christmas rush and learn horrid multiplication tables! If anything was work, that surely was!
But where there’s a will there’s a way and Mary Louise did it. She did it so well that she remembered all of the seven table perfectly. She also went on and learned the eight and nine table and the ten table—that was easy. Then, being quite enthusiastic, she tried hard at the others and mastered the twelve table after keeping at it a steady day. With the proceeds of these earnings, paid gravely by daddy, she was able to buy Benny a game, and when she went to buy it and found some little poor children right by the car that stopped at the entrance of Bunty’s Department Store, she was able to invite them then and there and go right in and buy presents for them. They needed woolen scarfs and mittens, and Mary Louise had found presents on the toy shelf among the toys kept for very special occasions. These would do for them.
When once Mary Louise had started to help Santa Claus, there was no knowing where she would end. Whenever she went out, she saw little children whom she was sure Santa Claus had forgotten because they looked so wistfully in at shop windows. Some of them nurse let her speak to and she added these to her list for the party. There seemed to be no table of thirteens to learn but daddy gave a dollar for every poem she could recite and Mary Louise knew ever so many and it was easy to learn short ones.
Oh, dear! Oh, dear! How the time did fly! Before Mary Louise knew it, Christmas Eve was there! There had been all the fun of fixing the tree and daddy and mother had helped. Mary Louise hoped Santa Claus wouldn’t disappoint her! She hoped that he surely would come! She was very much relieved when James came in and said that he had just been asked to deliver a message that came from Santa Claus over the telephone. It was a telegram and it said: